The University of Arizona Press
Date: Thursday, April 24, 2025
Time: 7 p.m., CDT
Where: Jacobson House Native Art Center, 609 Chautauqua Ave., Norman, OK
Kimberly Blaser, author of Ancient Light, will read from her works as part of The University of Oklahoma’s Mark Allen Everett Poetry Series event. The opening readers will be Chelsea Hicks and Mitch Laman. Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist enrolled at White Earth Nation. She is a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member.
This in-person event is free and open to the public.
About Ancient Light:
Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.
With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.
